Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at Computer World asks himself when he first started using Linux after attending the Linux Foundation Summit where several others were asked the same question. The Linux Foundation has posted a video of some of the answers; boy, do I feel young.

There was a version of slackware on "Mikrobitti Huvi- ja Hyöty CD-ROM" 1998 (i.e. a CD that came with magazine subscription). Yeah, I was late - but my previous pc (before PII 266mhz) was a 8mhz 8086. I had tried to install minix on that one, but failed.

I think slackware was distributed as floppy images on the cd, but that was not a big deal.

I played around with that quite a bit, but Linux was not all that useful if you didn't have internet (i.e. the PCs were mostly used for gaming). It was easy to set up X with my S3 Virge/DX, and using Linux in general was not much harder than it is now - but it didn't have to support that much hardware back then.

I do think Linux really became viable desktop alternative around Red Hat 9 (which was superseded by Fedore Core 1). The important change was font rendering : it stopped looking like crap.